Why Airbnb's New Head of Design Believes 'Design-Led' Companies Don't Work

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Why Airbnb's New Head of Design Believes 'Design-Led' Companies Don't Work

Airbnb's new Head of Design. Alex Schleifer.

Nando Alvarez-Perez/Airbnb

The gospel in the Valley these days is startups must be "design-led." Sure, your founders have to be engineers, but your first hire had better be a designer.

This is due largely to the current state of technology, particularly apps. As things get easier to build, fund, and support, good design is one of the few remaining competitive advantages. But once a startup gains any kind of scale, can it really be "design-led"? How do you structure a creative organization experiencing hyper growth? "That foundation hasn't really been in place at the companies you see today, because they're all young businesses," says Alex Schleifer, Airbnb's new head of design. "Lots of people are struggling."

Schleifer came to Airbnb from Say Media to take what may be one of the most coveted jobs in the design industry: leading user experience, production design (the visuals and branding that goes into UX), and user research at a company headed toward an 11-figure IPO. His job isn't necessarily to design products, but to design how Airbnb works.

Schleifer argues that most tech companies have taken an entirely wrong approach to building their design organizations. "In the last few years experience design has really been given a seat at the executive table," Schleifer says. "But the models that were inspired by industrial design and older companies just don't apply."

We're talking at Airbnb's plush headquarters, in one of the many conference rooms modeled after Airbnb properties. "There is a scramble to figure out what the culture of design is" Schleifer says. "But saying that a company has an engineering or a design culture just isn't productive, because that all just comes down to personal opinion."

A New Organizing Principle

The proving ground, according to Schleifer, lies in the lines of responsibility and the linkages between designers and the organization at large. Typically, companies try to create "design cultures" in two ways: By either sprinkling designers across all their product teams, or by creating a design team that rotates among project groups, like a roving internal consultancy. Both approaches fall short. Sprinkling designers as needed leads to disjointed products, since the individual teams inevitably have their own slightly different visions. Internal design consultancies, meanwhile, tend to work only on massive projects, leaving many details left to unguided product teams.

You see these approaches spread across the Valley, to varying degrees of success. Both Facebook and Google scatter designers across the organization, but have had to adjust that approach due to varying outcomes. Other companies, such as Dropbox, are still experimenting with the consultancy model and trying to figure out how to make design something more than a bunch of beardoes in heritage denim, parachuting in with new ideas.

The solution Schleifer and CEO Brian Chesky devised actually deemphasizes the designers. The point, Schleifer says, isn't to create a "design-led culture," because that tends to tell anyone who isn't a designer that their insights take a backseat. It puts the entire organization in the position of having to react to one privileged point of view. Instead, Schleifer wants more people to appreciate what typically lies only within the realm of designers—the user viewpoint. Thus, every project team at Airbnb now has a project manager whose explicit role is to represent the user, not a particular functional group like engineering or design. "Conflict is a huge and important part of innovation," says Schleifer. "This structure creates points where different points of view meet, and are either aligned or not."

Some of the best design-savvy companies, like Apple, have figured out differing approaches that effectively turn every person involved into defacto user advocates, but then again, Apple has had three decades to institutionalize that culture. Airbnb's approach does seem fairly novel, simply because it deals with a problem that bedevils any product company to one degree or another: Designers tend to design for themselves, whether they intend to or not. User research, meanwhile, often has limits. It'll tell you what's wrong, but it only rarely leads directly to great products. A true user perspective is something more nuanced, specific, intuitive, and independent.

The World Beyond the Screen

So what sort of picture does Airbnb have of its users? What sort of user viewpoint would be represented on those product teams that Schleifer has designed? "Most of the time when you're experiencing Airbnb you're picking up keys, shaking hands, putting in a Wi-Fi code," he says. In other words, Airbnb is both an app and a website—but unlike most apps and websites, 99 percent of the transactions it fosters happen in the real world. Those are what the users ultimately will remember about their Airbnb.

Thus, according to Schleifer, the important thing about the Airbnb experience—and perhaps tech-driven experiences in general—is that "people are in constant motion and interacting with your tool in specific ways throughout the journey." According to Schleifer, "You need to bring your tool forward when it's most needed, and hide it when it's not. And then you need to build the transition from the digital world to the real world. We're constantly talking about designing for mom and dad and the travel experiences we can transform offline. That will the be the focus on the big stuff we'll be launching."